Surgery to replace the femoral portion of a hip joint in total joint surgery can involve the insertion of a stem in a cavity formed in the femur. The end of the stem extending from the cavity has a neck which is formed at an angle, and a ball disposed on the neck is mated with a socket in the hip. Patients can require individual fitting of the implant due to the unique anatomical requirements of each particular patient. Some prosthetic implants can be unitary in nature, wherein the femoral stem and the ball are made from the same component. However, such unitary devices can require the hospital or surgeon to have a large quantity of prostheses available in order to be able to provide a correct fit for each patient. It can be very costly to maintain a large inventory of unitary prostheses. Furthermore, despite having a large number of unitary prostheses to choose from, an optimally fitting prosthetic cannot always be found. This leaves the surgeon to use the best fitting prosthetic available, which may result in discomfort for the patient.
More recently, modular prostheses have been designed to overcome this longstanding problem. Exemplary modular prostheses are described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,015,257 to Crowninshield et al., U.S. Pat. No. 8,562,690 to Dickerson, and U.S. Pub. No. 2008/0167723 to Acker et al. These prostheses, however, can result in the surgeon needing to intraoperatively align and connect various components. Typically, a surgeon is left to manually assemble the various components using different holding devices and a mallet or hammer to apply the desired assembly force. Due to differences between surgeons and each particular patient, these procedures can result in considerable variation in the final implanted prosthetic. Such procedures are described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,974,483 to Murray and U.S. Pub. No. 2003/0229357 to Dye.
Examples of various surgical instruments are described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,133,765 to Cuilleron, U.S. Pat. No. 8,123,754 to Siebel et al., U.S. Pub. No. 2010/0152742 to Nevelos et al., U.S. Pub. No. 2011/0004318 to Tulkis et al., and U.S. Pub. No. 2011/0071534 to Tuke.